Wall Street Brokerage Firms Face Trading Glitches

On Monday, Fidelity, TD Ameritrade, and other Wall Street brokerage firms faced trading glitches when Wall Street opened for trading.

Brokerage firms experienced service interruptions as oil and stocks soared after upbeat news from Pfizer on a coronavirus vaccine.

According to the Downdetector app, customers of Fidelity, Merrill Lynch, Charles Shwab, Vanguard, and TD Ameritrade experienced slowness on their brokers’ platforms.

Downdetector app monitors over 3000 services in 25 countries.

Customers believed the issue related to high trading volumes after Dow Jones gained over 1,300 points and S&P 500 rallied more than 3% – both hitting new records.

TD Ameritrade resolved its issues around 20:20 GMT. This was after its customers logged hundreds of reports beginning shortly after the trade opened.

Schwab also confirmed it had technical issues. These were ranging from delays in order updates to keeping customers away from their trades and accounts. However, by afternoon they had not said if they had resolved the issues.

Bank of America’s Merrill Lynch customers also reported challenges, including slow websites and mobile apps. Users complained about it, but the bank denied having experienced an outage.

IG Group spokesman told Reuters that their platform had “unprecedented” trading volumes in the 30 minutes following Pfizer’s announcement. Trading volumes were up to 10X the level seen earlier in the day, which also broke the previous record set in March.

Traders took to their social media platforms to criticize their respective platforms and threatened to switch to competitors.

Trading glitches have become widespread and common, but rare for several to happen simultaneously.

Coronavirus concerns made it difficult for major US brokers to keep their services online during the financial turmoil.

Brokers often blamed crashers on a steer trading volumes and new accounts sign-ups, promising to improve infrastructure and investing in more redundancies.

Robinhood, an extremely popular online brokerage, experienced several system-wide outages throughout the year. Their customers also had difficulties accessing their accounts.

However, the no-fee investment app did not report any issues today even though it was part of the same multi-system market outage, which affected the US’s major platforms in August because of the higher-than-usual trading volumes.